Microsoft has released a new version of the Internet Explorer Web browser for the Apple MacOS/PowerPC platform. This new version includes a faster, more strict rendering engine, code-named “Tasman,” online auction tracking, and built-in support for streaming video and sound.

The Tasman rendering engine is now purported to be faster–even while rendering pages much stricter–than its Windows cousin.

Well, this new Mac edition of MSIE, according to this Gecko article, could actually be the most standards-compliant Web browser in town, even beating my own personal favorite, Opera. Why? Because of the amount of programming time and money spent on MSIE 5 for MacOS, which beats the relative development time of any past Internet Explorer releases, which were rushed to be released just to beat the competition (i.e., Netscape).

Microsoft's own MSIE 5 Macintosh Edition Homepage shows the usual marketing crap that's spun out by MS in its releases, but it also shows MS is really pushing this release to Apple Mac users–and even users of other platforms–to show that Internet Explorer can actually be an impressive browser, without breaking the rules, when MS puts some work into it :)

But I guess we'll have to wait a bit for some extensive benchmarking before anyone makes up their mind for sure.